How was attending butoh Camp in Morocco, as opposed to doing butoh in Europe?

Researching and being in the desert was really incredible. Butoh is a dance of transformation. By moving from inner landscape and imagery, it can appear liquid, like stone, shape-shift and twist to reflect the perspective of other life forms and structures. I have spent 12 years training and dancing butoh, working in all environments, but mostly within European contexts (apart from one amazing intense month I was lucky enough to train in Japan with some early butoh pioneers), from black box spaces, studios, mountains, forests, cityscapes and playgrounds, but I had never experienced the desert, its incomparable vastness, quiet, softness but with such arid struggle for survival. 

We did exercise that reflected our surroundings, like shifting the body as if made of grains of sand, rolling as tumble weed, falling down dunes and fighting against sandstorms. We practiced Body Weather (a physical practice first developed and named by Min Tanaka) working on techniques using gravity and natural kinetics, simple carrying of stones with intention. The work connected me back to the principles and foundations of butoh and motivation for moving (movement is driven by fundamental need). I felt very emotional when the camp ended as I realised I had reignited a strong motivation and re-opened a creative channel (something I had been struggling with over a year of physical difficulties and emotional strain).

Your work is incredibly visceral. Is it important to you that you leave audiences feeling excited and fired-up?

I read a quote recently that said “it’s not worth doing art unless it changes you in some way.” Although I  believe that art doesn’t always have to be meaningful or good or understood, I do want people to be excited by what they see or feel; that it has the potential to change a perspective, to feel or see something they may never have encountered before. To be surprised, delighted, emotional. What I have uncovered in the making of a work, is that the process has changed me in some way, and so in sharing, I hope that people will feel that too. A physical and emotional commitment to what I do means the movement and intention goes beyond the body into space, and I believe the audience can feel that—an enlivened sense of space and connection between us, well I hope for that! I endeavour to make work where this happens, and I guess that’s why I get so nervous about sharing work because I invest and care so much about what people will feel when they see it. I hope they feel excited, moved, stirred, sad, it may vary; they may find it bewildering, strange, exciting, hilarious. The important thing is they feel something.